Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

A snippet from Donald Trump’s conversation with CNBC on Thursday raised the ire of numerous media commentators, who called Trump’s plan “unprecedented” (CNBC), “fanciful” and a “threat” (New York Times), and “tantamount to a debt default” (Yahoo Finance). Others called his remarks “reckless,” while Tony Fratto, a former Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration said, “This isn’t a serious idea — it’s an insane idea.”

What sparked the ire? The initial impetus was when Trump said, “[The U.S. Treasury is] paying a very low interest rate. What happens if that interest goes up two, three, four points? We don’t have a country. I mean, if you look at the numbers, they’re staggering.”

Indeed they are. The U.S. Debt Clock shows the national debt closing in on $20 trillion, while the economy is slumping along, with a GDP at just over $18 trillion. Put another way,

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, May 5, 2014:

Perhaps the most famous quote regarding statistics comes from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” The only trouble is that Mark Twain said it didn’t originate with him: he got it from British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. But historians haven’t been able to find that phrase in any of Disraeli’s writings!

How appropriate is that? One cannot even validate a quote about statistics to prove

Thomas Sowell has done it again: he has punctured the helium-filled balloons filled with politician’s promises, using words without meaning. Who controls the meaning of words controls the conversation.

First are the words “fiscal cliff.” Peter Schiff had the best explanation: the fiscal cliff is a combination of spending cuts and tax increases which, taken in the aggregate, would cut the annual deficit by $500 billion. Period.

The “tax holiday” is the temporary reduction in payroll taxes funding primarily Social Security. And the debt ceiling is the imaginary limit to government spending that gives politicians the opportunity to promote themselves on TV before voting to raise it.

Sowell first wants to talk about the phrase “tax the rich.” The problem is that it’s all for show:

Despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on “the rich,” even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government’s financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days. (my emphasis)

Peter Schiff, hard-money advocate and former candidate for the Senate from Connecticut, wrote in Townhall.com that he expects the congress to punt on the fiscal cliff.

I am doing a lengthy print article for The New American magazine on what congress ought to do to save the government from bankruptcy. I also wrote that the congress can’t kick the can down the road any farther – we’ve run out of road.

Schiff thinks they can. First he explains what the fiscal cliff is all about:

Stripped of its rhetorically charged language the fiscal cliff is simply a legal trigger that will trim the deficit in 2013 by automatically implementing spending cuts and tax increases. In other words, the government will spend less, and more of what it does spend will be paid for with taxes rather than debt…

The fiscal cliff means that the federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012.

That of course assumes that congress does nothing. But congress will do something, even if it’s

Following the announcement last Thursday by Senator Rand Paul that he was endorsing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the Republican Party’s nominee for President, he took time to respond to critics of that decision in an interview with Peter Schiff. Said Rand: “Supporting the [Republican] nominee has been part of my [effort] to have influence…. If Republicans see that you are not going to support the nominee, then doors close.”

Rand’s strategy is much more political than ideological. He feels that he can do business with and make binding agreements with parties with whom he has major disagreements but those agreements can only be made if he is allowed “inside.”

The latest report from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System confirms what every sentient being already knows: The economy is in the dumper, with little improvement expected. The report used words like “considerably slower,” “deterioration,” “flattened out,” “weak,” and “depressed” to describe current conditions, and it even noted that excuses such as bad weather and the earthquake in Japan “appear[ed] to account for only some of the current weakness in economic activity.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the Board had a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious) and

When Bloomberg polled so-called real estate “experts” about the housing market, they expected a slight pull-back in housing prices of perhaps 0.2 percent when compared to a year ago. Instead, the Case-Shiller Index showed prices dropped four times greater than expected: “The biggest year-over-year decline since December 2009,” according to the group.

This caused many of those observers to confirm the worse than expected result.

The unremitting flow of negative news about the economy has finally caught the attention of the mainstream media, causing an increasing number of economists to make comparisons between today’s recession and the Great Depression.

David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff’s chief market economist, commented to his clients that the monster drop in new home sales in June compared to May was not exactly “a one-month wonder” but instead invited comparison of the current recession’s similarities with those of the Great Depression. He said they include:

Pew Research recently polled Americans about ways to bring state budgets into balance and found that respondents did not like any of the options. In its Congressional Connection poll released June 28, Pew Research asked if a federal bailout of financially troubled states should be considered. Barely one in four said yes. Nearly 60 percent said no, that the states should take care of their problems on their own.

Other options offered by Pew included cutting transportation funding, raising taxes, cutting health services, reducing spending for police and fire departments, and slashing the public school budget. Each of those options was also strongly opposed, often by majorities approaching 70 percent.

When the House passed the 2,319-page Dodd-Frank financial reform bill by a vote of 237-192, all it did was confirm for many the extraordinary hubris of legislators believing they could in fact “fix” the problems they themselves created which resulted in the Great Recession of 2008.

John B. Taylor, professor of economics at Stanford University says, “The main problem with the bill is that is based on a misdiagnosis of the causes of the financial crisis…the presumption that the government did not [already] have enough power to avoid the crisis.”

The culprits blamed for the failure of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008 included the company’s top executives, their accountants, their highly-leveraged loans that had started going bad, their success at hiding those bad loans by cooking the books, and their lenders demanding more and better collateral, according to Anton Valukas in his 2,200 page report released Thursday.

There is certainly plenty of blame to go around, and it looks like there will be criminal charges filed too. The biggest lie, however, wasn’t mentioned: that this implosion of Lehman Brothers caught everyone by surprise.

When the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that “the output of goods and services…increased at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009,” the usual suspects in the kept media could hardly restrain themselves. ABC News’ headline trumpeted, “Economy Grows…Fastest Since 2003” which was “fueled by companies boosting output to keep stockpiles up.” Their announcement explained that “Growth exceeded expectations mainly because business spending on equipment and software jumped much more than [was] forecast.”